At the same time I arrived at the Fleet Golf Club, where most of the officers were billeted, feeling vastly diffident. I’d never seen a gun, never given a command in my life and hadn’t the first or foggiest idea of the sort of things gunners did, and my only experience of an officers’ mess was my dinner with the Major in France. Vaguely I knew that there was a certain etiquette demanded. It was rather like a boy going to a new school.
It was tea time and dark when the cab dropped me at the door and the place was practically empty. However, an officer emerged, asked me if I’d come to join, and led me in to tea. Presently, however, a crowd swarmed in, flung wet mackintoshes and caps about the hall and began devouring bread and jam in a way that more and more resembled school. They looked me over with the unintentional insolence of all Englishmen and one or two spoke. They were a likely-looking lot, mostly amazingly young and full of a vitality that was like an electric current. One, a fair willowy lad with one or two golden fluffs that presumably did duty as a moustache, took me in hand. He was somewhat fancifully called Pot-face but he had undoubtedly bought the earth and all things in it. Having asked and received my name he informed me that I was posted to his battery and introduced me to the other subaltern, also of his battery. This was a pale, blue-eyed, head-on-one-side, sensitive youth who was always just a moment too late with his repartee. Pot-face, who possessed a nimble, sarcastic tongue, took an infinite delight in baiting him to the verge of tears. His nickname, to which incidentally he refused to answer, was the Fluttering Palm.
The others did not assume individualities till later. It was an amusing tea and afterwards we adjourned to the big club room with two fireplaces and straw armchairs and golfing pictures. The senior officers were there and before I could breathe Pot-face had introduced me to the Colonel, the Adjutant, and the Captain commanding our battery, a long, thin, dark man with India stamped all over him and a sudden infectious laugh that crinkled all his face. He turned out to be the owner of a vitriolic tongue.
A lecture followed, one of a series which took place two or three evenings a week attended by all the officers in the brigade, a good two thirds of whom were billeted in the village and round about. Of technical benefit I don’t think I derived any, because I knew no gunnery, but it helped me to get to know everybody. A further help in that respect was afforded by my Captain who on that first evening proposed getting up a concert. Having had two years on the stage in America I volunteered to help and was at once made O. C. Concert. This gave me a sort of standing, took away the awful newness and entirely filled my spare time for two weeks. The concert was a big success and from that night I felt at home.
To me, after my experience in the ranks, everything was new and delightful. We were all learning, subalterns as well as men. Only the Colonel and the Battery Commanders were regulars and every single officer and man was keen. The work therefore went with a will that surprised me. The men were a different class altogether to those with whom I had been associated. There were miners, skilled men, clerks, people of some education and distinct intelligence. Then too the officers came into much closer contact with them than in the Cavalry. Our training had been done solely under the sergeant-major. Here in the Gunners the officers not only took every parade and lecture and stable hour and knew every man and horse by name, but played in all the inter-battery football matches. It was a different world, much more intimate and much better organised. We worked hard and played hard. Riding was of course most popular because each of us had a horse. But several had motor-bicycles and went for joy-rides half over the south of England between tattoo and reveille. Then the Golf Club made us honorary members, and the Colonel and I had many a match, and he almost invariably beat me by one hole.
My ignorance of gunnery was monumental and it was a long time before I grasped even the first principles. The driving drill part of it didn’t worry me. The Cavalry had taught me to feel at home in the saddle and the drawing of intricate patterns on the open country with a battery of four guns was a delightful game soon learnt. But once they were in action I was lost. It annoyed me to listen helplessly while children of nineteen with squeaky voices fired imaginary salvos on imaginary targets and got those gunners jumping. So I besought the Colonel to send me on a course to Shoebury and he did.
Work? I’d never known what it meant till I went to Shoebury and put on a canvas duck suit. We paraded at ungodly hours in the morning, wet or fine, took guns to bits and with the instructor’s help put them together again; did gun drill by the hour and learnt it by heart from the handbook and shouted it at each other from a distance; spent hours in the country doing map-reading and re-section; sat through hours of gunnery lectures where the mysteries of a magic triangle called T.O.B. became more and more unfathomable; knocked out countless churches on a miniature range with a precision that was quite Boche-like; waded through a ghastly tabloid book called F.A.T. and flung the thing in despair at the wall half a dozen times a day; played billiards at night when one had been clever enough to arrive first at the table by means of infinite manœuvring; ate like a Trojan, got dog-tired by 9 p.m., slept like a child; dashed up to London every week-end and went to the theatre, and became in fact the complete Shoeburyite.
Finally I returned to the brigade extraordinarily fit, very keen and with perhaps the first glimmerings of what a gun was. A scourge of a mysterious skin disease ran through the horses at that time. It looked like ringworm and wasn’t,—according to the Vet. But we subalterns vied with each other in curing our sections and worked day and night on those unfortunate animals with tobacco juice, sulphur and every unpleasant means available until they looked the most wretched brutes in the world.
Little by little the training built itself up. From standing gun drill we crept to battery gun drill and then took the battery out for the day and lost it round Aldershot in that glorious pine country, coming into action over and over again.